The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  They arrived in the market town of Kilrush in the failing light. There had been a horse fair and the streets were filled with its aftermath. Boys moved about with sticks and wore the air of men. Women disassembled wooden stalls on wheels and cried out at cats, dogs, and children. A pony and trap came with speed and the flickering of a long whip as a youth of fifteen made a show of recklessness and skill and galloped wildly past. Boys yahooed and ran after him. Some shabby genteel in ornate waistcoats and ragged jackets posed like men deserving of their idleness and studied the crowd. Others, beggars of all description, moved in broken file with hands out, offering prayers for pennies or food. Those who had abandoned even this slumped by the roadside as the sun went down.

  Francis Foley walked the pony and cart through them all. He walked with his head erect and his nostrils drawing hard on the air as if to bolster a thin faith. It was over three years since he had left the monk. It was three years since he had seen the map with the island sketched upon it, and in that time he had often wondered if he had imagined it or it had been a ruse of the holy man’s to get him to leave the telescope. He wondered if the monk was dead. There were a dozen elements of chance spinning like glass balls in his mind. He shook his head at them. He realized suddenly the full weight of hope that pressed upon this moment. Here was to be their destination at last. Here was to be that home that would be theirs and for which he had set out so long ago and all but destroyed the family for whom he wished it. He walked down the streets of Kilrush to see if the future existed. He screwed his eyes tight and opened them again, and as he turned down Francis Street he kept his eyes low on his opened and broken boots. He watched them take each step of the road. He watched how they swung up into the air and fell again in that mindless way and how the soles flapped and the sores on his shins showed. He did not look up. He walked down toward the banks of the river. The girls had stopped singing. His sons did not speak. If the island were not there, he would will it into existence. He would rent the skies and call down new creation. He paced more slowly. He turned and brought them along by the shoreline. He let go the reins of the pony and Teige took them. The old man did not look up. He drew in the smell of that river that he knew now better than all the smells of his lifetime. The road beneath his feet turned to mud and sand, and at last he stopped. His head was bowed as before God.

  “Tell me what you see,” he said.

  The heaving of his breath and a little river breeze made uncertain his words.

  “Tell me what you can see, boys,” he said again.

  They looked. The dog came from the cart and stood at their feet.

  “There is an island,” Teige told his father. “There is a green island.”

  12

  They sailed to that island the next morning in a narrow, canoelike boat that was made of canvas and coated in pitch. The boatman was a thin fellow with light gait who rode the rise and fall of the waves like a cork and kept his eyes on the horizon as though it were the drawn limit of the world. They were such a scene. Blath had to be carried on, and her boarding in the bobbing waters by the little jetty was itself an adventure. The two young girls had never been on the sea. When they understood what was to happen, they shook like paper dolls in the breeze and had to be cajoled and lifted by the brothers, during which they came more vividly alive and boarded the boat squealing and wriggling and kicking. It was only when they were aboard and the dog jumped to join them that they calmed and looked about and marvelled at the water over the side. Francis Foley had bartered with the boatman and left to him the pony and cart until such time as the old man could come and pay for the ferrying and reclaim what was theirs. The boatman was not much inclined to conversation. He shook his head at things he said only to himself. There were fragments muttered, disagreements, but to those listening there were only bits of language, phrases clipped short and left like the scissored lines of disparate letters.

  “Iniscathaig? Scattery?” he had said, and nodded. Then, as he stood back and watched them lift Blath aboard, he had added, “Not that I believe it… oh no. Ha! Blessings and curses, says he, and that’s that.… Saint Senan himself never and—” He stopped abruptly then and said no more, and they were no more enlightened as he dipped oars and pushed off.

  So, in one canoe then, with Teige looking backward at where the white pony was tethered on the dock, they sailed out into the swift current of the river. What had seemed flat slow murky water from the land soon became a slapping tide where the sea met the Shannon. They tossed upon it like a thing of little substance, and the two brothers thought of the last time they had seen that river with their father. Francis himself was standing in the bow. He knew that he was a man who would not drown. The day was cold and a wind cut across them as they pitched forward. For a time the island seemed to get no closer, though the boatman worked hard with his oars and kept his eyes fixed on the destination ahead. Still the island lingered there before them. It appeared for a time as though the current were uncrossable, that though they laboured they would never arrive and were held there in midwater in a vision at once tantalizing and purgatorial. The canoe lay low in the river. Water splashed and wet the girls and they cried out with glee and Blath held her arms around them. The boatman talked words to the fishes that sped beneath them and rowed on. Beyond the island, the coastline of the County Kerry seemed like another country. None of them considered it, so bound were they now on this small green place that Francis Foley had dreamed. Then, as though they had passed through an invisible portal in the tide, suddenly they were near enough to see the gulls walking on the pebbles of the shore.

  Francis Foley cried out. He cried out and waved his arms and was in danger of falling overboard. His sons did not know what to do. Tomas shouted to him, but the old man kept it up and the girls shouted then too and the gulls rose off the shore and wheeled and screamed and beat their wings in the sky above them. Francis shouted out a long, wordless sound of no language that was greeting and announcement and victory. Then to the astonishment of all, he stepped out of the boat and made as though he could walk on the surface of the water.

  Tomas reached forward to save him but was too late.

  He stepped but was only up to his waist in the water, for they were in the shallows now. And then Francis walked up ahead of them out of the sea and was in his own mind a fabled discoverer arriving on shores untrammelled by the history of bitterness and betrayal that was his country’s. He walked up upon the pebbles and slowly turned around to look at those coming in the boat. He waded out to meet them and carried Blath in his arms. Teige and Tomas took one of the girls each upon their backs and went back again for the small bundles of their things. By the time they had laid the last of them on the coarse sand, the boatman had already turned the canoe and was rowing back toward the town.

  They stood with slow comprehension. They had at last arrived at the place where they could live in safety and peace, and as this realization dawned Teige looked at Tomas and then smiled and laughed and his brother laughed too and the young girls ran about and skipped on the sand.

  Then the old monk appeared.

  He was there before any of them had seen him coming and seemed to have dropped from the sky. He did not look a day older than the last time Francis had seen him. He wore his brown cassock and his hands were concealed where they held each other inside the sleeves. In the moments when Francis first saw him, he thought the monk an apparition of his own conjuring. He stared at the monk and said nothing. Then he looked at the others to see that they too saw him. He felt lighthearted with their celebrations. His long body shivered without sensation of cold. The monk’s eyes were upon his and seemed of a piercing blue. His bare head was hairless and what grew at the sides of his temples was grey. When he spoke his voice was a warm, deep honey.

  “Here you are at last,” the monk said.

  The sound of his words made him real. Francis Foley’s mouth was agape.

  “Yes, I can speak to you here. I knew you would come, but I d
id not think it would take so long.” The monk smiled and came forward among them, and his hands appeared. “These are your family,” he said, arriving before the astonished old man and holding out his hand to him in welcome. “I am very pleased to see you at last.” He stood smaller than all but the girls and reached and took the hand of the man in his and shook it firmly. “Welcome,” he said to Francis, “you are all very welcome.”

  The brothers stood with the girls where Blath lay supported against a rock on the shore. They were speechless. The small waves lapped and dragged some pebbles back and forth in watery dance. Gulls arced overhead.

  “Come,” the monk said then. “Let me help you. The place is not very much, but it is dry.”

  And he gestured with his hand the way forward, and when they did not move he motioned again and led them himself up from the shoreline and along a track in the grass. For a small and older man he was nimble on his feet and sprang forward at times like one hurrying to show a rainbow. And the Foleys followed him, the girls skipping in the windy exposure of the sloping island, Tomas carrying as best he could the woman on his back, and Teige and his father loping behind. Happiness lit their faces. They passed up across the island, taking the green track and startling hares that darted and zigzagged away. The whole of the island could be seen then and the Shannon waters about it now grey, now blue, as the sun came and went in high, scudding cloud. The way took them through a stile in a stone wall, past tangles of hedgerow and briar and entwined woodbine in early leaf and led them to a tall, round tower of stone. Beside it were other small buildings, too.

  “There were seven churches here,” the monk said cheerily over his shoulder as he strode on. “This is the place of Saint Senan,” he called out. “It is an ancient site, from before the days of the Vikings,” he added. “Now, here. In here.”

  They entered into the shadows of the stone building of one room where a table and stools stood. In the corner lay a bed of straw.

  “It need only be the beginning,” the monk said. The Foleys stood with slow comprehension. They looked at the stools as if to see the figures of themselves sitting there, but it lay beyond their imagining. The monk allowed them their bewilderment but added, “There are many stones, there can be other houses. And here, come, look.” He stepped outside again and this time Francis Foley was near to him and the monk pulled on the old man’s ragged sleeve slightly and led him in through the doorway of the tower as the others crowded behind like visitors to the House of Miracles.

  And there in the centre, all gleam and polish and impossible perfection, stood the stolen telescope.

  THREE

  1

  And so in the story of our family is explained how the Foleys came to live on the island called Scattery in the estuary of the Shannon River. Sometimes the story goes no further. Sometimes you are left to surmise, to consider how these people became yours, how your great-grandfather moved out of the stuff of fable, and how the threads of the story unwound and brought it across the Atlantic Ocean. But if the teller is an old man maybe sitting in a diner in Mount Kisco, New York, or speaking quietly in a corner of a living room when the relations are gathered after a funeral, the story spins seamlessly on and those Foleys do not fade into the dark.

  Within twelve hours the monk was gone. By some secret prearrangement the boatman came back and the holy man sailed from the island when all were sleeping in the small light of the dawn. He left without explanation or farewell. He did not tell them why he had come there or why leaving. He did not narrate how he had been waiting alone for years on the island and how he had reasoned it a kind of penance between God and himself for sins of avarice and covetousness. He did not tell how his sojourn was a kind of exile from the holy is-land farther up the river, and that the appearance of Francis Foley there was a sign from above that he was forgiven and could return home. All of this the Foleys would only gradually discover in time from the stories told of the monk in the town of Kilrush. There, in time, they would learn of his arrival with the telescope and his taking the confession of the landlord McKean and how he had bargained with him some portion of salvation for the rights to the island fields that were after all Saint Senan’s. They would hear of this and other stories, and in time all the stories would mingle and join tales of the monk’s cures and other miracles and they would come to think of him as a figure fallen from the skies. He would take on the same unreality and magic as had the saint himself and become like the whispering wind in the rushes.

  In the dawn when they woke, he was gone. Francis stooped out the low door in the stone house and knew it. He did not need to walk down to the shore. He stood in the light drizzle with the birds of April flitting around him. He shielded his eyes from brightness that was new to him, for the island had its own light and lay softly sometimes in gleaming opalescence. The stillness was palpable. The simplicity of light and grass and birds and falling drizzle was all there was. And in that landscape the innocence of the world was recaptured for him and was a thing of stone and earth and water. It was the first time in a thousand mornings that Francis Foley did not feel the need to move onward. He stood and did nothing at all. He felt himself an old man and felt the regret and loss that he had caused and endured on his way to that moment wash through him like the tide beyond. He breathed the air of the island as if each breath were parcelled and gifted to him and might not long continue. He stood at the wall and opened his fingers upon it, the stones cold and damp. Briefly he thought to say a prayer but did not. His sons were still sleeping. He watched over the river and the fields for a long time and in that time saw that there was a white swan that seemed to linger there, paddling by the foreshore.

  Later, when the drizzle had passed and the sky was creased in folds of light from under long sleeves of cloud, Teige and Tomas woke to the sound of metal hitting stone. When they went outside they saw their father digging the monk’s little garden. He turned over the ground with such ease, it seemed ground of no weight at all. Black furrows were opened in straight lines as though drawn from above. He worked and did not look up. Rooks rose and alighted there and the smaller birds came and went. The dog lay in the freshened earth and watched its new master. Tomas and Teige readied another of the cabins fit for living. They found a low stone cabin where hay and potatoes and cabbages and onions were stored, and another that may have been a stable in ages gone. They made a dry bed there, raised on timbers and facing the door. Outside it, where the wall faced south across the river, Tomas built a seat roughly hewn with the monk’s ax, and in the afternoon he carried Blath there wrapped in a blanket and she sat in the thin sunlight and looked out. She was weak and weighed less than a figure of sticks, but she smiled at him and called him her fool. Deirdre and Maeve were all times at her side. They brought her drinks of cool water from the well they had found. They combed her hair with their fingers and smoothed and brushed out her blanket as though it were some faery raiment. In turn she seemed to have upon them an effect of release, for by the end of that day their tongues were freed and they spoke and then chattered and sang.

  So they began. Within two days they had begun to set the patterns of their life on that island. In one of the buildings Tomas had found the monk’s fishing pole and line and brought it to the southern shore and pulled a silvered salmon from the river. They cooked it over an open fire and the smells of the fish climbed the air. They set seed potatoes, the young girls bending in the furrows and pushing them into the ground and the brothers forking upon them the mulch of seaweed and sand and earth. Daily Teige and Tomas woke in the first thin wafer of light and like the boys of fairy tales hunted in the dawn fields for hares. They teased and chased and ran and tripped over burrows and tumbled and sighted hares running. At such times the brothers revisited some vanished or unlived part of their lives. The days of May climbed over them. There were high skies of blue with brown cloud. In her seat by the front wall, Blath coughed less often and, though her cheeks were strangely flushed with circles of red, in the evenings w
hen Tomas came to her they could hear her laughter for the first time. He made her laugh. It was as though the evidence of his love for her were continually surprising. As she recovered a frail health, her language grew more robust. She strung curses and other assorted phrases of colour at the crows that fringed the garden plot. The two girls delighted in these and giggled and skipped about chanting in singsong the foul language while the birds lifted in the air. And perhaps it was by this same magic, the effect of words spoken to them like a spell, that soon there came more and more birds, crows, magpies, thrushes, starlings and tits, cormorants, oystercatchers, and such. And these flocked and flew over the island and darted and soared above the opened brown apron of ground and chorused in a nexus of trilling punctuated only by the flat, accented tones of gaily cried Limerick curses.

  For his own part, in those early days, Francis Foley lived like a monk devoted to the making of their home. When the garden was dug, he turned to the building of a cottage. He walked the island and considered all possible sites, then settled on a ridge of ground on the northern shore near where the boatman had landed and where they could see the town of Kilrush across the river. One week he made a wooden barrow with rough wheels. The next he was carting stones in it. He did not tell his sons what he was doing, he did not ask for their help. He simply went ahead like one blinded by vision and they watched him and understood and were then there at his side. They made a cottage of dry stone walls three feet thick. The flesh of their hands dried and hardened in that handling and their fingers became crooked and locked in tight curvature like the limbs of the blackthorn. Their shoulders broadened, their arms hung out farther to the side so that even when free of stones the three Foleys seemed to bear burdens. The cottage rose off the ground slowly. Canoes carrying turf sailed past on the way to Limerick. Ferry boats and cargo ships trafficked in the estuary, but to them all Francis Foley turned his back. He did not want to deal with the outside world and for a time was able to ignore it. Then one afternoon when they were setting a flagstone as a lintel above the room door, the thin boatman appeared before them.